Thieves World 3 – Shadows of Sanctuary by Asprin, Robert

knife? He could not credit it. Yet the eunuch had said – and in such straits no

one lies – that though Jubal had gone to Zaibar for help in dealing with Tempus,

the slave trader had known nothing of what fate the Hell Hounds had in mind for

their colleague. Never mind it; Jubal’s crimes were voluminous. Tempus would

take him for espionage – that punishment could only be administered once. Then

personal grudges must be put aside: it is unseemly to hold feuds with the dead.

But if not Jubal, then who had written Tempus’s itinerary for Hell? It sounded,

suspiciously, like the god’s work. Since he had turned his back upon the god,

things had gone from bad to worse.

And if Vashanka had not turned His face away from Tempus even while he lay

helpless, the god had not stirred to rescue him (though any limb lopped off him

still grew back, any wound he took healed relatively quickly, as men judge such

things). No, Vashanka, his tutelary, had not hastened to aid him. The speed of

Tempus’s healing was always in direct proportion to the pleasure the god was

taking in His servant. Vashanka’s terrible rebuke had made the man wax terrible,

also. Curses and unholy insults rang down from the mind of the god and up from

the mind of the man who then had no tongue left with which to scream. It had

taken Hanse the thief, young Shadowspawn, chancemet and hardly known, to

extricate him from interminable torture. Now he owed more debt than he liked to

Shadowspawn, and Shadowspawn knew more about Tempus than even that backstreeter